A printing system generally comprises a printer, an ink cartridge, a chip mounted on the ink cartridge, and the like. In printing work, images and characters are formed on printing media according to control information output from the printing system. In the printing process, replaceable printing components such as the ink cartridge are large in loss and need to be replaced frequently at the end of the life of the replaceable printing components. In the replacement process, an original ink cartridge or a same-generation compatible ink cartridge is generally needed for replacement so as to be compatible with the printer and give response to printing work normally. However, if the expensive original ink cartridges are used for a long time, the cost of printing consumption can be excessively high, requirements of all users cannot be met, and fair competition of other suppliers is limited. In addition, along with continuous upgrading of the printing technique, firmware of the printer generally needs to be upgraded once in two to three years, and a printer of a novel type is released, so ink cartridges which have already been purchased by users and have not been used yet have to be discarded, and the same-generation compatible ink cartridges matched with the upgraded printer have to be purchased again, consequentially, the cost of the printing consumption is increased, severe resource waste is caused, and residual ink and ink cartridges can even cause environment pollution.
In addition, it is found in long-term use that the utilization rate of ink in the ink cartridge is not high enough, and the ink is not completely consumed. Meanwhile, when a certain printing system is used for ink-jet printing through the ink cartridge for the first time, a low-ink state is displayed when about 15% of ink is still left; when an ink-out state is displayed by the printing system, ink needs to be added into the ink cartridge again for the second round of printing, or a new ink cartridge is directly used for the second round of printing; when about 30% of ink is left in the printing process, the low-ink state is displayed by the printing system again, shortly afterwards, a user is informed of ink-out information in this round of printing, and the quantity of ink left in the ink cartridge in this round of printing is larger than the quantity of ink left in the ink cartridge in the first round of printing. After a long period of time, the utilization rate of ink in the ink cartridge is not high, consumable loss is large, cost is extremely high, and the printing efficiency is low.
For this reason, for making ink consumable be compatible with printing systems of all big brands, certain compatible ink consumable manufacturers adopt the method sequentially including data encryption, intermediate transmission and decryption to make replaceable components compatible with the printing systems; certain manufactures adopts the method of conducting function simulation on relevant components such as sensors used for detecting the ink quantity, however, the method only solves the compatibility problem and cannot solve the problem of low ink utilization rate and low printing efficiency at the same time.
For solving the problem of low ink utilization rate, analog sensors used for detecting the filling degree of recording materials, such as ink, in the ink cartridge are successfully adopted by the compatible ink consumable manufacturers, ink consumption is actually controlled according to data in an ink cartridge chip, and thus the ink quantity is accurately measured. However, for printers of different types, the scheme is poor in universality. Since different printing ink consumption threshold values for stopping printing are set for printers of different types, for example, for certain printers, printing is stopped when the ink consumption rate reaches 120% or 100%, so that for achieving accurate measurement of ink consumption and avoiding extra ink waste, different quantities of ink needs to be filled into printers of different types. Obviously, the scheme has limitation, and even extra ink waste can be caused.